Over the recent months, a site that can make you big money has really found its audience, from a clever promising idea to an active community of users. I’ve already mentioned it when it started, and I mentioning it again now because it is getting big: WP Questions.

If you don’t know this site, the theory is dead simple: people ask questions and disclose the little amount of money they’re willing to offer, experts answer and hopefully win the cash if their answer gets selected.

Since its debuts, the site has gained real traction and what used to be cheap ass $3 questions are now much more interesting little gigs. Interestingly too, there are now coders who completely offloaded their support to WP Questions, such as Ronalfy with his WordPress and Ajax ebook.

I didn't have time to write the code for the charts so I hired Lark Davis to build out the remaining charts that I wanted. Many thanks to her.

Some background info:

• Allan Cole offers themes for WordPress.
• Allan Cole signed up with WP Questions to receive donations from us whenever we get a question about his themes.

We have software that runs on the 1st of each month and sends out the money, 3% of any question. Today was the first of the month, and our software sent the following email to Allan Cole.

One of our goals is to be good citizens of the open source communities we belong to, and for us, good citizenship entails sharing some of our revenue with the developers, so we offer to donate 25% of our profits whenever we get questions marked with the custom tags related to their projects (plugins, themes, software).

Your project is named: Allan Cole Themes

Custom tags associated with your software: Boumatic, Mixtape, allan cole, autofocus, fthrwght, neutica

Number of questions with these keywords: 7

http://www.wpquestions.com/question/show/id/689

http://www.wpquestions.com/question/show/id/686

http://www.wpquestions.com/question/show/id/666

http://www.wpquestions.com/question/show/id/629

http://www.wpquestions.com/question/show/id/610

http://www.wpquestions.com/question/show/id/593

http://www.wpquestions.com/question/show/id/555

Total to be donated: 4.29

take care,

the team at WP Questions

http://www.wpquestions.com/

These are pure donations on our part, an attempt to help support open source development. Allan Cole doesn't need to do anything to get this money, but every month we will send him money when we get questions that touch upon his themes.

If you are a developer of open source WordPress themes are plugins, you should register too.

168 people have asked a question.

196 people have posted an attempt at an answer.

84 people have received money for their answers.

1,351 people have joined the site.

So, about 1 in 8 (12.4%) of the members ask questions, and about 1 in 7 (14.5%) post answers (there is some overlap, as some members both ask questions and answer questions).

Of those who have posted an attempt at an answer, 42.9% have received money for their answers.

For me, the big surprise is that there are more people asking questions than there are people getting paid for answers. On a site where prize money can be split among multiple experts, and on average 1.2 people receive money for every question, I would expect the number of experts receiving money to be greater than the number of people asking questions. But apparently that is not the way it works. Clay Shirky long ago noted that freedom of choice will lead to an inequality of results as people's previous choices effect other people's future choices, but I assume that is not what is happening here. I'm guessing there is a small core of advanced experts who just happen to have the best answers to most people's questions, most of the time. Though I am keeping an open mind about this.

I'm also very curious about the 73% of the membership that has neither asked a question nor attempted an answer. Perhaps they are simply fascinated with the posts, and so they've signed up so they can read along. That would make sense to me, since one can learn a lot about WordPress, simply by reading the questions and answers on WP Questions. I know that I, personally, have learned a lot.

I have a suggestion to make on the usability front. Right now, the < code > tag contents comes with a horizontal scrollbar. It's pretty annoying to view the code that way.

How about changing it, to like the ones on wordpress blogs. By default, the overflow would be hidden and on mouseover, the code box expands to show the whole code. It'd also have options for "Quick copy" and "print"

I am curious how other people feel about how we format code?

1.) To make it easier for you to browse through the archives, we've put in pagination of the archives on the front page. You can now click back through the whole history of the site.

2.) Log in to read answers. The answers are still free to all, but from now on, you will need to log in.

3.) The questions that a member has asked are now grouped together on one page, as part of the member's profile.

From: Rockman Ha
Date: 7/28/2010
Subject: Gilt Groupe Ruby Engineer Opportunity

Gilt is a leader in the hottest area of ecommerce: flash sales in apparel and luxury goods. We are blue chip venture backed, already achieved 300 mm scales, 300 employees, growing rapidly and building out our senior team.

All executives are top talent from Expedia, Amazon, Yahoo. You can find out more about them at http://www.gilt.com/company/

For more information about the company please take a look at our press kit. http://www.box.net/shared/fgbot06ta4

We're looking for an exceptional Ruby Engineer to help us continue our amazing growth. We believe in TDD, BDD and are huge on Agile. The position itself requires someone to be extremely technical with cloud computing, open source (we contribute/use/host/LOVE it) and be able to architect solutions for potential scaling problems. We get an extremely large spike on a daily basis since our limited sales (they last for 36 hours) tend to sell out literally in 15 minutes. We house some amazing developers and there is always an opportunity to learn here.

I'd definitely like to speak to you in further detail of the opportunity if you're interested.

Warm regards,

Rockman Ha
Technical Recruiter
Gilt Groupe
New York, NY 10011
646.929.6725
Rha@gilt.com
www.giltgroupe.com/invite/rockman

We passed the $5,000 mark just 3 weeks ago.

These are our current top experts:

1. You are not the moderator. Only Darren Hoyt and I are moderators. Please do not make up rules about how things should happen. If you feel something has happened that is unfair, contact us and we will make a decision.
2. Please do not paraphrase what I've written. Instead, link to what I've written. The post Ensuring Expertise Stays Public and Visible was referred to, but it was not linked to. I feel that it was mis-characterized.
3. If you feel someone on our sites is being unfair, you can contact them privately, or contact us and ask us to do something about it. If you talk it over with us and you feel like we have not heard your claim, you can always write it about it on your blog, or on Twitter. But do not post your complaint on WP Questions itself, or any other Codewi.se site.
4. Above all, please try to be professional and polite in all communications. If there is an issue to be discussed, then we will discuss it, but getting angry does not help the situation.

Thank you.